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Leopard leap

The new operating system for Macs is almost here, writes Garry
Barker.

Leopard, aka Mac OS X 10.5, the new Apple operating system that
makes Vista look like yesterday's boiled custard, will be released
tomorrow. Ordering has been under way for the past week.

A single-user version including shipping is $158 from the Apple
Australia online store or from dealers. A family version is
$249.

Many of its features are known such as Time Machine, a space
travel approach to find your way back into the history of your
files.

There is a new desktop, a new Finder with Cover Flow (the album
art viewer in iTunes) to review your documents. You can preview
files without opening the application in which they were made. And
much more.

The Macintosh clan is so eager I think they might stay up all
night waiting for the arrival.

Shift yourself

Time-shifting, one of the great joys brought to entertainment by
modern technology, is pretty standard among users of iPods and
personal video recorders. Record a show or a podcast, bung it onto
the iPod and listen or look as you ride the train or the tram to
work.

Mostly the time-shifted shows are local but there is a huge
radio resource on the internet - more than 50,000 stations around
the world.

These range from the internet presences of major broadcasters,
such as our ABC, the BBC (probably the biggest and arguably most
competent user of the internet), down to amateur efforts that are
sometimes excruciatingly self-indulgent and occasionally quite
good.

And there's a way to record those stations and listen to them
later using the audio application Radioshift, from Rogue Amoeba,
(rogueamoeba.com), the maker of the excellent Audio Hijack and
other good shareware.

It offers a free trial download on the website. The program is
about 13MB. If you like it, a licence fee paid online through a
secure gateway costs $US32.

Radioshift is well up to Rogue Amoeba's high standard but its
greater virtue, in my view, is not the ease with which it allows
you to record internet broadcasts but its extensive and growing
internet radio guide that is part of the package.

How else are you going to find all those stations? You could use
Google but simply asking for "internet radio" would get you the web
equivalent of insane confusion. Radioshift's guide eliminates a lot
of such frustration.

Its interface is well designed. It is nicely graphical and
generally in tune with the style of Macintosh.

You can search for internet broadcasts by name or genre or you
can scroll through the guide. Alternatively, you can call up world
maps and click on places that you either know or think might
produce a radio gold nugget.

Paris, for instance, has some nice Gallic jazz stations.

The idea is that you find the stations you like, subscribe to
them and tell Radioshift when, and for how long, you wish to record
their output.

The recordings are then automatically saved in the background.
When you later open Radioshift you can listen to them or send them
to iTunes from where you can load them into your iPod.

The boffins at Rogue Amoeba say it is also possible to record
programs from AM or FM stations using a USB receiver such as the
Griffin Radio Shark. Radioshift tunes in stations through the
device and handles them as it does internet stations.

You need RealPlayer and Flip4Mac on your Macintosh, whereupon
you can play streams in Real Audio, Windows Media, QuickTime and
MP3 formats without fiddling about finding the right player.

Radioshift is (so far) Macintosh-only and has been widely
praised by reviewers.

Melbourne Macintosh enthusiast Danny Gorog says it could be "the
next killer app", which has caused modest blushes of pleasure in
the Rogue Amoeba camp.

Adam Engst, writing in the highly respected TidBits forum, gives
similar praise, saying it "opens up a whole new world of
high-quality, free content".

Essentially, this is yet another example of that wonderful
concept, and hated word, "convergence" - through the power of the
internet.

MACFILE

Until the advent of Intel, Macs were never seen as serious
gaming machines, not among the serious (ie addicted) combatants of
the heavy-duty games of the Doom, Warcraft and Armageddon
variety.

But that is changing with more of the big PC game companies
turning their attention to the dual-core Intel Macs, although I
think the PC arena - in which the most enthusiastic players build
their own machines, some of which seem to need a nuclear power
station and a Bunnings-sized cooling system - will stick with their
platforms.

Despite all this earnest activity at the high end, simple
solitaire is enormously popular; simplicity has its charms.

A source of nicely designed games that test your skill, amuse
and divert you may be found at Big Fish Games. A visit to the
website is worthwhile if you want something to while away an hour
or two that won't involve a second mortgage yet will not insult
your intelligence. You can try any game free before you buy.

I like Dream Chronicles, billed as a surreal puzzle game
(surreal it certainly is) and have spent (er, wasted) in total,
probably more than a day playing Luxor.

Big Fish operates as a kind of club. You open an account and may
then buy either 12 games a year at $US6.99 ($7.83) a game or take
just single games for $US19.99 each. It's at bigfishgames.com.

1192941137237-smh.com.auhttp://www.smh.com.au/news/how-tos/leopard-leap/2007/10/24/1192941137237.htmlsmh.com.auThe Age2007-10-25Leopard leapGarry BarkerThe new operating system for Macs is almost here, writes Garry
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